The Revolt That Saved an Empire

In the spring of 399 CE, a Gothic cavalry commander named Tribigild returned from Constantinople to his provincial garrison in the Phrygian highlands and made a decision that would shake the Eastern Roman Empire to its foundations. His petition for overdue payments and career advancement had been dismissed with the bureaucratic indifference of a court too consumed by factional politics to recognize a dangerous man's legitimate grievances. Within weeks, his Greuthungi cavalry were burning estates across Anatolia, and within months, a crisis that began as a provincial mutiny had become an imperial catastrophe.

The Revolt That Saved an Empire traces the two-year crisis of 399-401 CE in full narrative depth - from the Danubian defeat that first brought the Greuthungi to Phrygia, through the political machinations of the eunuch chamberlain Eutropius, to the Gothic occupation of Constantinople itself and the violent popular insurrection that expelled it. At the centre of this story are figures of extraordinary vividness: Gainas, the Gothic general playing a long political game; Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed patriarch who refused both Eutropius his church and Gainas his heresy; Valentinus of Selge, the provincial landowner who nearly ended the revolt alone with rocks and local knowledge; and Fravitta, the pagan Goth who chose Rome when his kinsmen chose otherwise.

This is the story of how the Eastern Roman Empire survived its most dangerous internal crisis - and why that survival made all the difference.